I'm a Melbourne-based software dev and I've been building a social discussion platform as an Australian alternative to Reddit. It's at topicle.com.
Built and hosted in Australia with servers in Melbourne. Registered Australian company (Topicle Pty Ltd), self-funded with no VC money. Software is one of the few areas of tech we can genuinely build here without importing parts from Shenzhen, so this is coded, designed, hosted, and run entirely in Australia. Analytics are self-hosted, there's no Google or Facebook tracking, and user data is stored under Australian jurisdiction.
With Reddit now a US public company licensing user data to AI companies and a new appetite for non-US options, it felt like the right time to build something locally that puts users first. A few things that set it apart:
Moderator accountability - mod actions are logged publicly on every community, every action can be appealed to site admins, and accepted appeals automatically restore removed content. Communities can't be run as fiefdoms.
No ads, no algorithmic feed - no promoted content or engagement-optimizing algorithm. The default sort ("Depth") promotes articles and discussion over memes and image posts.
Country flags and no private profiles - flags are displayed next to all posts and comments based on where you're posting from. All user history is public. Makes it much harder for bots and astroturfers to blend in.
Privacy first - IP addresses are hashed before storage, self-hosted analytics, no third-party trackers, full account deletion and data export. Designed with Australian privacy law in mind.
App is currently being worked on. There's a mobile-optimized site for now, which isn't a bad experience, but not quite an app. Should have news on that in the next month or so.
I appreciate that, I enjoy working on this a lot, creative programming is something I get a lot out of personally, it doesn't feel like work, so not to worry. Mobile development is actually my career before doing this, which is why I'm giving such a short estimate on the app.
All refugees welcome! I'm trying to make something explicitly based outside the US, because the options for non-American social media are very limited.
All of those are things I've tried to address directly. Data is stored in Melbourne on Australian shores, no AI licensing deals, no ads or algorithmic feed, and mod accountability tools to prevent communities from becoming echo chambers. Happy to go into detail on any of those.
Haha, fair feedback. The design is still evolving. If there's anything that specifically feels off, please use the Feedback button or just post it here. Very open to feedback and keen to see this succeed and harsh feedback will be the only way to get there.
Just checked it out. It looks pretty cool, you've done a really great job, are you a solo dev atm because that's pretty impressive.
Anyway, my only criticism is that pretty much everything on there at the moment is people sharing news articles. To see more stuff like people posting gameplay photos/vids, discussions like r/unpopularopinions, or just photos or posts similar to subs like r/interesting, would be cool. Maybe some memes.
Naturally more of that will come with user base but maybe there some way to kick it off. Start some game pages etc. yourself.
Yes, solo dev at the moment. Perhaps not in the future, but at the moment I'm doing everything. I've been working on this for a few years now.
Good feedback on the content, starting a social network is pretty difficult because you need content to get users and users typically post content, so the chicken-and-the-egg issue is significant.
I'll keep seeding communities to provide users outlets to talk about stuff, hopefully the post today will inject a flood of new users, so we can start moving away from solely news articles to more interesting content.
Thanks for the info. That's a great idea. I'll be honest, growth and community outreach is my weak spot. If anyone has suggestions for Australian Facebook groups that might be interested, I'm all ears.
Hi, it's me, the suggester. Really happy to see you've gotten so much attention. People are really desperate for some alternative social media so I hope you'll have a lot of success! (And of course I've joined).
Just checking how the country flag IP exposure is going to handle people VPN’ing in and out? Given Australians have been given many reasons to use VPN’s this last year 🥲.
This is an iffy one, especially considering people are using VPNs more because of the social media rules. VPNs are currently blocked for posting and commenting. The flag is based on the IP you're connecting from, so if you're on a VPN it'll show the VPN exit country rather than your real location, which defeats the purpose. If the flags aren't accurate, then bots and astroturfers can thrive pretending to be from countries they're not actually from. Still evaluating what the right approach is here and taking feedback!
No age verification at the moment. The site is SFW-only for now, which sidesteps the whole issue. One day we'll enable NSFW, when a solution for age verification is figured out that doesn't involve invasive face scans.
You can say whatever, as long as you're not overtly racist. It's more about obligations under the eSafety act to restrict 18+ content. The full list is here tl;dr porn, violence and gambling. No restrictions once age verification is in place, but until then, I have to disallow it temporarily.
Thanks for signing up! The costs are actually pretty low with a small userbase, sustainable indefinitely with no issue. If it grew 10x or 100x, it might start to strain a little, but that's a good problem to have, it means people are getting value out of the site and perhaps there's subscriptions or donations or some model to buffet the cost. And you can always optimize the software to drive down costs with caching and performance optimization. Next goal is to release an iOS app and to get a self-sustaining community, maybe 1000 active users. Hopefully in the next few months. Thanks again for checking the project out.
Thanks for being the change you want to see! I tried Lemmy but couldn't get my head around the servers so I'm excited to try something else. There's something about a small userbase and content that actually ends that is greatly appealing. Just need to figure out which of my favourite communities I want to replicate :)
No idea what they're up to these days but Rubén Mayayo was the solo dev of Boost for Reddit which was my favourite third-party app before the API changes (and is still what I primarily use to browse Reddit!). Might be worth reaching out if you're working on an Android app? I know iOS and Android app development can be quite different.
Yes, I think people not gelling with the federation model is pretty widespread. Threads also tried enabling federation and it seems to have gone nowhere. Thanks for the tip about the Boost developer, my specialty is iOS so having an Android developer at hand could be really valuable. Thanks again for joining!
we definitely need more non US tech here down under. Happy to help if you are keen in developing mobile apps. Wishing you the best. I'm signing up. LFG!
Way more beautiful and approachable than the ui for lemmy instances I've seen. Good job.
(and why can't the lemmy ecosystem get their act together and make something appealing, anyway?)
Good to see it. This nation needs our own online space. I have a similar project in the pipeline but with a broader scope; we're running a crowdfunding campaign early next year. DM me if you're interested in collaborating. We've got a team of around 8, just waiting on two of us to finish our PhDs this year and then it's all systems go.
P.s. You're using some US English spellings on the site -- I highly recommend switching to Australian English, if your intention is to be some kind of national platform. Dialect choice might seem benign, but if you're marketing this at Australians, you need to localise the platform accordingly.
Cheers. Good feedback on the spellings, this is the second mention of this issue, so clearly important and I'm planning to deal with it in the next month.
Awesome -- Keep up the good work. There's a bit of an Australian tech community forming with the goal of digital sovereignty. Add to that the need to get away from legacy business models, which contain shareholder primacy and other perverse incentives (I saw elsewhere you mentioned getting money through advertising -- I'd caution against this; it misaligns the incentives for the business and users). Like I say, very happy to collaborate if you want to cross-pollinate ideas.
If you're in Melbourne you might be interested in getting in touch with Digital Rights Watch; they might be able to support your project in some way.
Keep at it and try to establish a good/solid user base.
This is definitely key! My expertise is in software, but community building is new to me. But we're off to a good start here and I'll keep pushing and try to get this large enough to take on a life of its own. Really appreciate the support!
Not yet sorry, working on an iOS app currently and Android will follow shortly after. The mobile web version is pretty functional however it is definitely not an app. Working as fast as possible on getting both apps out though. I also wanted to move away from American reddit and hopefully this turns out to be the answer.
Thanks for the heads up, the server has been restarted now. This kind of failure slipped my monitoring net, I have automated alerts for the server fully down, but only a partial failure doesn't trigger it. I'll put in some monitoring for this specific case to make sure it doesn't happen again and I'll have to scour the logs to figure out what went wrong.
I appreciate the donations offer, I'll look into adding a button today. Thanks for your support, for creating the electronics community and seeding it with posts.
Thanks, really appreciate the support. I built this because I wanted non-US options for social, but nothing was materializing.
An app was in development already, but I hadn't realized it was such a priority before this thread. Numerous people have requested it (and some even said they wouldn't use the product at all without one!), so it's now the top priority.
There's a very basic comment reaction system at the moment where you can mark a comment 'funny', but it's pretty unsophisticated. I can definitely look into expanding it if it's something people want. Thanks again for the support.
How do you plan on making money if you’re not gonna run ads and don’t have funding? If you get more users your costs are gonna start to increase. Will you ad adds eventually?
Thanks for signing up. The costs are very low at the moment and sustainable indefinitely without funding. If the site grew larger, in order of preferences, I'd look at optional premium memberships for additional features, donations and then tasteful ads, ie not from a large ad network but preferably self-serve. Thanks again!
Thanks for signing up! Avatars are on the radar - another user has requested them too. Still figuring out the right approach here as I want to enable people to customize their profiles more, but avoid turning into a real-life identity platform like Facebook. Thanks again.
The design takes inspiration from a variety of places, Digg relaunch was one of them. I've never seen the other two. Fundamentally though every social site has a particular set of elements they need to include and most of them have converged on similar configurations, because it seems to be what works.
All cool ideas, I'll investigate all of them and see how much can be implemented. I also got your feedback through the site feedback mechanism. I agree the search in particular could use a facelift. Thanks for all the well-considered feedback, greatly appreciated.
Great suggestions, I avoided polls originally because the community was so small, they'd get 50 votes at most, which is a potentially embarrasing ghost town signal. Now the site is larger, it would be a good addition.
Thanks for the comment. It may eventually have tasteful ads to support the server costs, but I'm trying to respect user privacy as much as possible, so I'm still trying to find an advertising angle that is compatible with that. I'm mostly focused on building a community right now and trying to create something people want to use, I'll think about revenue later.
Is it as restrictive and as pathetic as Reddit?
Will l get banned for comparing the Israliis to the Nazis ?
Does it have this stupid karma thing to stop bots then have groups flooded with bots?
It's much more relaxed, I'm trying to avoid the moderator hall monitor assault and endless inscrutable rules you might encounter here. You're welcome to politically criticize Israel as much as you like, provided it's not actual racism or bigotry. There's plenty to criticize without veering into hate and vilification. There's a points system, the site is hostile towards bots and I will police it as best as I can personally but will also rely on users to report bots so we can prevent them from getting a foothold. There's also numerous automated mechanisms to catch bots, so it's not all reliant on human vigilance. Feel free to signup and give it a go.
Hosting locally was a deliberate choice because hosting in the US seems worse for privacy nowadays. IP addresses are hashed before storage and there's no third-party tracking, so there's not much to hand over even if asked. I'm holding onto the absolute bare minimum data to run the site, intentionally. This is the opposite approach to most other social media.
I just checked my Google Lighthouse accessibility report and I'm scoring 84/100 at the moment - decent but room to improve. I'll continue working on this and if you find any accessibility issues, please report via the Feedback button in the bottom right or feel free to message directly.
As for funding, the running costs are low right now, so no funding required. If costs start to rise, this is a good problem to have because it means people actually like the site, I'll look into some kind of membership model like Reddit Gold or tasteful self-service ads. Very keen to avoid overseas ad networks that hoover up your data to target ads to you.
Topicle has a focus on moderator accountability, anti-astroturf and anti-botting, hosted in Australia specifically avoiding all the nonsense going on in the US at the moment and avoids some of the issues of federation like inconsistent modding, overlapping communities, users still using it like a centralized site except with a rougher signup experience. Your data is also portable on this site, it's exportable at any time. I have no issues with federation, it's just not the direction I went with this site. Still open to doing a hybrid federated design like Threads, but the focus will be centralized simply because it seems like that's what most people are interested in.
I think ASIO would be pretty disappointed at how little data I'm retaining. IP addresses are hashed, no third-party trackers, no ad networks. Worst honeypot ever.
So this was a small oversight on my part, there was no visible way to create communities on mobile, only desktop. I've just pushed a fix for this now. Use the yellow (+) button on the home page to create a community. Let me know if you run into any issues, and I'll have it sorted quickly. Thanks for the inadvertent bug report!
Great feedback, obviously onboarding needs to be improved so you can pick your interests upfront instead of manually unsubscribing to communities later. In the meantime, you can use https://topicle.com/subscribed to unsubscribe quickly. This page needs to be surfaced better because a few people have complained about this. Thanks again for the valuable feedback.
Yep, that's exactly the plan. A bubble/interest picker during signup is the right way to do it. Lots of people in this thread had issues with the initial assortment of subscribed communities, so it's a necessity to fix.
Good suggestion, will definitely look at expediting adding that. Sign in with Apple is probably the most privacy conscious third-party signup method, with their anonymous email relays.
Thanks for the support! I actually registered .au but neglected to register the .com.au, so that is rectified as of about 5 minutes ago, silly mistake! .com is the kind of the default internet domain extension, that was the primary thinking. I want the site to be Australian-hosted and run but the location not be the primary identity.
Hello! I just signed up and it looks good so far. But... seeing as you're collecting unsolicited feedback, I don't like the spoilered titles. I totally get why you do it this way, but there's really no clue as you what you're trying not to spoil. So do I just avoid everything like this or do I click on them all just in case it's interesting/I already know/I don't care about the spoiler?
In this example, it's about Arsenal winning the leaguebut all I can see is that it's in sports. There was another post like this but about a cricket result. Again, I understand why, but also there's going to be loads of people who care about one and not the other.
I'm not sure the best way around it. Maybe there could be a clue next to the spoiler tag (eg 'Team A vs Team B result', 'Premier League news' or something) then it's clearer if I want to open it or steer clear.
Great feedback, I'll see if I can implement some kind of categorization mechanism so you can ignore spoilers you aren't interested in. There's a flair system implemented, so perhaps posts in sports could be flaired per sport? Perhaps even opt-in, opt-out of spoilers on a per sport basis. Reddit drove me nuts spoiling overnight F1 races, so this was an attempt to fix that, but it could definitely do with dialing in further. Thanks again for the feedback.
Might just be a hangover from Reddit, but I'm used to clicking on the titles of a post and being taken to the discussion page. On Topicle, I instead go to the article itself. Not saying this is a bad thing (maybe it's great because it makes people more likely to actually read the article) but it certainly feels unfamiliar at the moment. Might be a 'me' issue.
.com is just the default internet domain, the servers are in Melbourne and it's all made locally. It also runs off topicle.au and topicle.com.au if that feels better.
Server costs are very low, so it's sustainable out of pocket while it's relatively small. A modest VPS is overpowered for the current site. Once it gets larger and presuming it actually does, some kind of membership, donations or tasteful self-serve ads without any privacy-destroying overseas ad network would be the path forward. But cross that bridge when we come to it.
Just joined. Looking forward to the future app. When looking at the communities part, I didn’t see any means to subscribe to a particular community or at the very least favourite them. Is that something you’re interested in adding in future? If communities grow around certain interests (e.g. a particular game or movie or book), I’d like to see more of that interest vs irrelevant stuff like the Formula 1 or MAFS fans or something.
Thanks for joining! You can join and leave communities at the moment through the 'join' or 'leave' button in the sidebar. You can also manage your subscriptions on the https://topicle.com/subscribed page. A few people have mentioned this, so clearly it needs to be made more obvious. The design does not make it clear enough right now. After this thread I'm also planning on improving onboarding, so you can pick your interests upfront, instead of having to leave stuff you're not interested in.
It's cool that you're working on something local! If you want to grow Topicle, try focusing on things unique to Australia, like local events, Aussie hobbies, or state-specific subforums. Feedback from early users can help shape the platform to fit what Aussies want. Engaging with communities on Reddit for their insights might be a good idea too. If you haven't already, think about adding features that Reddit doesn't have but people want, like better moderation tools or privacy features. Good luck with it!
Great idea, state-specific subforums is something not present right now. I'm also keen to get any feedback possible. Already a bunch of bugs have been fixed because of interactions in this thread. The site does have mod oversight and privacy protection that other platforms do not offer, which address some of the pain points of Reddit. Hopefully this comes across to users. If it's of any interest, there's more info about the specific unique features of the site here.
I have used Opus since December last year since it automates a lot of mindless boilerplate like writing models and CRUD in controllers, but was coding this by hand for years prior.
I'll definitely create an account and have a look around. I really like the lack of Facebook and Google gubbins.
I would really like to see a platform like yours offer integration with a proper Australian identity provider so that I have an assurance that I am speaking with an actual human who is based in Australia. I don't need to know anything more about them but if they can have a little green and gold tick, it's an assurance no other platform offers.
I would really like to see a platform like yours offer integration with a proper Australian identity provider so that I have an assurance that I am speaking with an actual human who is based in Australia.
Great idea, I am exploring an optional verification option. If you have any thoughts on specific integrations you want to see, let me know. I'm not super familiar with the landscape of identity providers in Australia at the moment. I'm very big on making the site as hostile as possible to bots and astroturf, as it's a personal pet peeve of my mine with US-based platforms. The internet is overrun with inauthenticity right now.
I've got a plan for a new kind of social network but I don't have your programming skills or the right attitude to start a start-up. I've got the domain name and am refining the concept, so maybe I'll make the jump... who knows?
Anyhow, the government's Digital ID System https://www.digitalidsystem.gov.au/ is nascent but seems to offer a consistent approach to digital identity.
Australia Post have a fairly mature one but there is a cost involved. I guess that leads to the question of how you'll make money. Will people pay you to enjoy the space you've created?
I wouldn't view it as a formal startup, just fiddle around and see whether something comes together. This was originally just a hobby project for learning the Vapor framework and wasn't intended to be anything serious. I was annoyed at the API shutdown and the end of the third-party Apollo app and wondered how hard it could be to build something comparable. Turns out, pretty hard, but still worth doing.
The digital ID systems are interesting. I don't know how to thread the needle between offering verification to make sure everyone is a human, and not alienating privacy conscious users. I'll have to think about this more.
As for money, the costs of the site are very low right now and I've made a conscious effort to minimize them as much as possible, no expensive third party APIs, everything self-hosted. There's also a lot of low hanging fruit still to be had with caching, to lower server requirements that I haven't explored yet. If the costs do start to mount beyond what can be sustained reasonably, probably some combination of premium membership, tasteful self-serve ads (no privacy invading big networks) and donations.
2 million seems like a good problem to have because you actually got traction. At the moment I'm focused on getting to 1000, which is a way off. If that ever comes to pass, there are monetization options like memberships, tasteful self-serve ads or donations.
Honestly though, you could probably host it on a single dedicated box at that scale. Stackoverflow handled 10 million users at its peak in 2017 off three servers. You can get pretty far for little money if you're not using one of the hyperscalers with their extortionate egress rates and sticking to more boutique hosts.
The tech stack is included below. The site was hand-coded from 2023 until Dec 2025 (with a six month break in between for a job with an IP assignment clause) and then assisted coding with Opus 4.5-4.7 since then, with code reviews by Codex. There's also some light AI for stuff like summarization of articles, NSFW detection of images, translation of post titles and comments, detection of sports spoilers, a few other miscellaneous usages, some done by LLMs, some done by random huggingface models.
I like the site design and the privacy ethos. There's a big drive for regionally hosted content right now with US being nuts. Reddit obviously has a pretty insane bot problem - you will have the same issue using Altcha. Have you experienced much bot posting yet or is it small enough that they haven't bothered?
I posted previously on /r/RedditAlternatives and got a few dozen real users, but several actual bot accounts with the same pattern of signup then within a few seconds create a post with an advertisement for some product. I was able to learn from that pattern though and put in countermeasures for that specific type of attack. Every drive-by is an interesting insight into the tactics being used and you get an opportunity to adapt and try and lock off that angle of attack.
Nothing like this with the /r/BuyAussie group, thankfully!
Sorry that's happening. There's an anti-bot check that requires the form to be open for at least a few seconds before submitting. If you're using a password manager that autofills everything instantly, try waiting a moment before hitting signup. Should work on the second try. If it continues failing, let me know. Anti-bot mechanisms are problematic because they can wrongly catch humans and there's still fine tuning to do.
Ah, def not autofilling. Even reloaded the page and it didn't let me in, but I had the tab open and forgot about it until just now and I was able to sign up! Just took a little while, I guess.
I'm going to have to tweak the mechanism because it's clearly going wrong, maybe get rid of it entirely. Glad you got in eventually and thanks for signing up and the valuable feedback on the signup process.
I originally started the project as a hobby written in Swift, which is my programming first language if you want to call it that as I'm from an iOS mobile background and was just messing around with Vapor web framework. Eventually it started to gather momentum and was unexpectedly turning into something maybe publishable.
I'm not totally sold on federation - centralized still seems to be the preferred model for most people and platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, most people stay on the main instance or have trouble figuring out the signup process or what even an instance is. I'm happy to do a fediverse integration if people want it, but it's not planned at the moment. Thanks for the interest.
Yeah the "which instance do I pick" really hampered mastodons growth for a bit
The way I see it, federation acts like a bit of a cheat code to fixing the difficulties of scaling up network effects for a platform like this. (E.g. I could happily browse all the Aussie related forums in yours, and still see the Lemmy cooking forums on the same app)
That said, integrating it isn't an easy task, and avoiding the Lemmy ML crowd may be for the best haha
Yeah the cold-start problem is really brutal, it's hard to get a critical mass of people who make the site feel populated enough to actually self-sustain. You start contemplating using 'growth hacking' dark patterns out of desperation. But the reception from this thread has injected a pretty substantial and high quality seed community, so the job now is to not let it die off.
I'll still keep federation in mind, Threads has a hybrid centralized/federated model that I like, one of the very few things to admire about Meta products.
It's deployed in a datacentre in Melbourne, no 'platform' like AWS or Azure. If you look at the ping times of the API, stuff that can't be cached, it should all be under 50ms which is only possible if its hosted locally.
There's a combination of behavioral analysis and machine learning to detect bots. Accounts that exhibit automated patterns are flagged for review and actioned. There is also have rate limiting and proof-of-work challenges on key actions to make automation expensive. I'm committed to making the site as hostile as possible for astroturfing and bots. It's probably my single biggest annoyance with this site, that bots appear to roam free without impediment.
So i saw you say NSFW isn't allowed, i fully get at the start it's a complex minefield to navigate, but are there any plans to allow things considered that in the future? not even asking out of the obvious sexual content standpoint, moreso from the standpoint theres some medical or advice subreddits out there that are also considered "NSFW" on reddit
Yeah definitely, it's something I want to support. You're right that there's a lot of legitimate content that falls under that umbrella - medical, advice, harm reduction, etc. I'm currently working on the age verification piece to make sure it's compliant with the new Australian social media laws before opening it up. Shouldn't be too far away.
It was mostly developed without it, Claude Opus was used to assist coding since December 2025 and I recently started using Codex 5.5 for code reviews to find bugs before they get committed, but the site has been in development since 2023, so the majority of the development was completed by hand. Opus is useful for pumping out repetitive code like CRUD operations and models , so you can focus on the actually interesting parts.
Cutting edge models like Opus and Codex are increasingly becoming standard software tools, it's hard to justify doing some of the more mindless work by hand if there's a faster way. As long as you manually review everything being produced, I'm comfortable working this way.
Same app, Otto had to be renamed due to a whole bunch of reasons, name was already trademarked as a social network, .com domain not available, Otto is a well-known department store in Europe. Topicle was the result of generating probably hundreds or thousands of portmanteaus and bulk domain searching to try to find a clean .com.
The costs are low enough at the moment that it's sustainable without much difficulty. If it ever gets popular, there's options like premium memberships for extra features, donations or tasteful ads (ie not ad networks).
Unfortunately not, but this is the challenge of trying to set up something new. You need active users to attract more active users. The traffic is gradually tracking upwards, but it's a grind. There's an 'active discussions' panel where you can jump into ongoing conversations, which is the best way to use it right now.
Happy to assist with administration or moderation. I used to be a community manager for a company who managed bands websites and forums
(Linkin Park etc) and worked in communities that received millions of posts in their lifetime. Forums got shut down over time but always happy to assist.
Question: In regards to the threads everything is collapsed, how do I make it so the comments are all open. I have changed it in settings to collapse nothing but they are still closed. I need to click through each comment to open it. Thanks mate
I think problem solved now. The issue was in settings: blocked countries were Australia and Finland. Most comments on the site will be from Australian users, so this would lead to most comments collapsed. It's a neat feature but can backfire. I'll add a more explicit indicator why comments are being collapsed and that it's because of the country filter. Thanks for your patience!
Appreciate the interest! Honestly one of the best parts of the project so far has been the solo velocity - being able to ship features fast without coordination overhead. Not ruling anything out long term, but for now I'm enjoying the pace of working alone on it.
The backend is implemented in this framework https://vapor.codes/, it's surprisingly capable nowadays. I haven't encountered anything I want to do that I haven't been able to. The templating engine Leaf is a bit underpowered, but if you use Vapor as an API and build the frontend in React, everything works great. You can also debug the backend in Xcode for complex issues and inspect runtime state. If you have a Swift background, I highly recommend it.
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u/Ash-2449 May 20 '26
Definitely a good idea, we need to start moving away from murica based platforms.
Though i would hope the site eventually includes avatars, core part of personal profile.